According to Pierre de Coubertin, the man who founded the modern Olympics and a former president of the IOC, women participating in the Games would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.”
In the same city where women made their Olympic debut in 1900, the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris aim to achieve gender balance more than a century later.
Over 11,000 men and women, including backups, enrolled to compete from July 26 to August 11; the IOC set an objective of a 50/50 split among them. But according to the IOC’s most recent statistics, the organizers might come up just short of that goal.
The inventor of the modern Olympics and previous head of the IOC, Pierre de Coubertin, believed that women competing in the Games would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.”
The 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, to be held in the same city where women first competed in the Olympics in 1900, are aiming to attain gender parity more than a century later.
The IOC set an aim of a 50/50 split among the over 11,000 men and women, including backups, who enrolled to compete from July 26 to August 11. However, based on the latest numbers provided by the IOC, it appears that the organizers may fall just short of their target.
“There is nothing more equal than a male and female competing as one team on the same field of play towards the same sports performance,” the IOC’s sports director, Kit McConnell, has said.
Paris Olympics Athlete Registration and Gender Parity
- The IOC database shows 11,215 athletes registered for the Paris Olympics, with a 51-49 per cent split in men’s and women’s events.
- The US has the most competitors in women’s events with 338, accounting for 53% of its 638-strong delegation.
- Other teams with more women include Guam, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, and North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.
- Six of the 205 official Olympic teams had no elite-level female athlete registered to compete.
- Qatar, which plans to host the 2036 Olympics, has just one woman in its 14-athlete team, while Mali and South Sudan are at 7.5%.
- El Salvador has one woman among eight athletes, with 12.5% of the athletes being women.
- Two nonbinary and transgender athletes are competing in women’s events.
- The first female athletes competed in the 1900 Olympics, with Charlotte Cooper of Britain being the first female individual gold medalist in tennis singles.
- Gender parity over the decades has improved, with women accounting for 4.4% of the athletes when Paris hosted the Olympics 100 years ago.
- The IOC has also pressured Olympic teams that traditionally sent only men to complete, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Brunei, for the first time at the 2012 London Olympics.
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